Archives for February, 2013

I spent the last weekend in scenic Parsippany, NJ, participating in the annual chess extravaganza known as the U. S. Amateur Team East. As big a chess fan as I am, I am mostly retired from tournament play. It’s too hard and stressful! For the first time in a long while, however, I managed to…

I am slowly working my way through the anthology Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative, edited by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur. The book includes an excellent essay by mathematician Timothy Gowers titled, “Vividness in Mathematics and Narrative.” It makes a point that has often bothered me about mathematical discourse. Gowers opens with…

Philosophers William Lane Craig and Alexander Rosenberg recently debated everyone’s favorite question: the existence of God. You can find the video here. The entire event is close to three hours long, and so I have not yet watched the whole thing. I watched the twenty-minute opening statements, and then did a bit of random sampling…

Sorry for another post that’s all about me, but I received a pleasant surprise today. The Association of American Publishers just gave out their annual PROSE awards. The awards recognize excellence in scholarly publishing in some forty categories. One of those categories is “Popular Science and Mathematics.” The winner in that category? None other than…

Writing in the academic journal Metascience, philosopher Stefan Blancke has reviewed Among the Creationists. Blancke is a postdoc in the Department of Philosophy at Ghent University in Belgium. Together with fellow philosophers Maarten Boudry and Johan Braeckman, is the author of an important paper calling into question some of the arguments made by the pro-evolution…

Here’s a charming story for your Friday afternoon: Be careful what you post on Reddit. It may just get you canned. Earlier this week, an Applebee’s waitress posted a photo on Reddit of a receipt from an alleged pastor who, instead of leaving the suggested 18 percent tip, wrote “I give God 10%, why should…